https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/purpose-parasites-by-kenneth-mikkelsen/ Fri, 22 May 2020 15:52:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.4 https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/purpose-parasites-by-kenneth-mikkelsen/#comment-344824 Thu, 22 Nov 2018 11:12:19 +0000 https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=1565#comment-344824 […] is not only drawn towards successful people. We praise companies when they pretend to have a higher purpose and claim to make a difference in our lives and communities. The truth is that very few companies […]

]]> https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/purpose-parasites-by-kenneth-mikkelsen/#comment-175906 Sat, 09 Sep 2017 14:03:58 +0000 https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=1565#comment-175906 Excellent points Kenneth! As I was watching the Davos video I was reminded of Emerson’s quip, “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons”. Words are easy; behaviour is difficult. The only member of that panel who came across as authentic was Hamdi Ulukaya. It seems that he is still working and thinking at the fine-grained, concrete, human level of his business (Chobani). For him purpose is still about who he is – it is the rhetoric of his identity, intrinsically valuable. The other panelists are working with abstractions, which makes the jargon easy and they lean on the logic of consequences, making the case that purpose is instrumentally valuable – it improves the bottom line. The EY Beacon Institute has even published an amoral (it didn’t mention ethics) paper on “The Business Case for Purpose”! I think that is is this instrumental justification (with mentions of ‘win-win’ and ‘buy-in’) of things that should be intrinsically valuable that totally undermines managers’ bona fides and leads to further cynicism on the part of those who work for them. Fairness and the common good resist quantification. Our task is not to come up with new metrics to offset the old financial ones but to challenge the very idea that everything that counts can be counted. Stamp out KPIs! They are a symptom of the problem, not the solution. When you can manage without KPIs then you know your organization has purpose…

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